This week we wanted to share with you an excellent example of welcoming back deaf students. The University of Edinburgh has released a welcome back video for deaf university students in BSL of what to expect when returning to University and also the changes that will be made in the setting due to COVID.
Some additions to the original post
Your setting has undoubtedly released information of this nature to students, most likely in English. This will be challenging to access for deaf students whose first or preferred language is British Sign Language (BSL).
BSL has a different grammatical structure from English as you can see in the example below:
ENGLISH: What is your name?
BSL: YOUR – NAME – WHAT
So can you imagine reading English paragraphs and trying to make sense of it?
Exactly that!
If there is the facility to offer this, we would highly recommend creating some simple content, like this welcome back video in BSL, to ensure that deaf students feel comfortable with all of the adjustments that have been made to University life to keep everyone safe.
You can see here the BSL plan that the University of Edinburgh has put together for supporting the use of British Sign Language in University activities.
